Junior Jonathan Bruns won first prize in the modern studio recording category at the 135th Audio Engineering Society Convention in New York City for his song Space. Jon joins the many previous AES competition winners from the Recording Arts department, showcasing the great music making and engineering we’re doing at the Jacobs School.

Following a successful premiere last year, Double Exposure – a collaboration between IU film students and the Jacobs School of Music – is back at the IU Cinema. Recording Arts students have been working since January creating, editing, & mixing dialog and effects; and recording music scores which were written by Jacobs School composition students and performed by Jacobs School musicians. A screening of the 10 films took place on March 3, accompanied by the live ensemble.

This project showcases one of the many inter-departmental collaborations that take place at Indiana University. Professors Mark Hood (Recording Arts) and John Gibson (composition) worked with Susanne Schwibs (Communication and Culture) and Jon Vickers of the IU Cinema to bring this project to the screen. Students will soon complete the final mix of these films, for a DVD release planned later this Spring. Here are a few photos from the session and screening, click here for more pictures.

An Indiana University sound archivist who co-authored a national recording preservation plan released last week by the Library of Congress said the work to save America’s recorded sound heritage has just begun.

The nation’s audible history is threatened by a variety of issues, including a lack of storage capacity and preservation expertise, rapidly changing technology, and disparate laws governing both historical and current recordings.

Brenda Nelson-Strauss, head of collections for the Archives of African American Music and Culture and former president of national advocacy group the Association for Recorded Sound Collections, said the congressionally mandated plan she helped write includes short- and long-term recommendations for the public and private sector and strategies related to infrastructure, preservation, access, education and policy.

But she and three other representatives from Indiana University who served on task forces that helped create the plan said it is only a first step, and that the more difficult task lies in actually implementing its recommendations.

For example, libraries aren’t allowed to collect online-only audio files available to download since most are subject to licensing agreements that allow use solely for personal entertainment, effectively circumventing the first-sale doctrine as well as educational and fair use allowances granted through copyright laws. The plan calls for convening a national forum to address such issues related to “born digital” audio files and to advocate for licensing agreements that are not detrimental to education and preservation.

Other representatives from IU who took part in the plan are:

Mike Casey, director of media preservation services for IU’s Media Preservation Initiative, who served as a member of the digital audio preservation task force.

Philip Ponella, director of William and Gayle Cook Music Library, who served as a member of the copyright, preservation and public access task force.

Konrad Strauss, chair of the Department of Recording Arts within the Jacobs School of Music, who served as a member of the education, professional training and research task force.

“The Library of Congress, the National Recording Preservation Board, the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences, the Association for Recorded Sound Collections and other organizations are already working together to decide which of the plan’s recommendations each group is going to actively pursue,” Nelson-Strauss said. “We’re very lucky here at IU because we have several major sound archives and an incredible core group of people who work with recorded sound and are active in ARSC. In fact, IU is mentioned prominently in the plan, as well as the study that preceded this plan, because of its Media Preservation Initiative, so the university has truly been at the forefront of this issue.”

The Media Preservation Initiative is an effort that began in August 2009 to identify, document and preserve the audio, video and film items housed on the Bloomington campus. It has developed plans to build a media digitization center and is working with campus units to prepare and prioritize their holdings for preservation services as well as future access.

“IU Bloomington owns more than 560,000 audio, video and film objects, including more than 350,000 audio recordings,” Casey said. “Like other national holdings, these are in great peril due to ongoing degradation and rapidly advancing obsolescence. We have a short window of opportunity in which to preserve these holdings for use by future generations of researchers and instructors. The new national audio preservation plan provides not only a call to action but a blueprint for developing the infrastructure, tools and expertise for achieving enduring preservation of critical cultural, historical and political heritage.”

The complete Library of Congress National Recording Preservation Plan and a timeline of recorded sound are available online from the Library of Congress.

The Indiana University Jacobs School of Music Recording Arts Department and the Central Indiana Audio Engineering Society are hosting the Second Annual Central Indiana Audio Student Workshop from 8 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. Saturday, Feb. 16. Programs will be held in the Musical Arts Center, Simon Music Center, Radio-TV Building and Echo Park Studios.

Recording industry students, instructors and professionals are all welcome to attend.

The entire event is free, including all workshops, recording sessions, guest lectures and lunch. Audio students in attendance are eligible to win prizes from sponsors such as SSL, Auralex, JBL and Sensaphonics.

Radio producer and Recording Arts alumnus Jesse McQuarters, BSOF, AS ’03, will travel to Sweden in August and September 2012 on an award from the Swedish-American Bicentennial Exchange Fund. There, he will conduct musicological research in support of the radio series Vykort fraÌŠn Sverige (Postcards from Sweden), which will air on 98.7 WFMT in Chicago.

Recording Arts alumni Tony Elfers (BS ’06) won a BMI award for his score to the discovery special “Flying Wild Alaska“. Tony composed the music in collaboration with iSpy music and Sonixsphere, where Tony is a staff composer. This is Tony’s second BMI award, he also won in 2011 for the season 2 of Flying Wild Alaska. Check out Tony’s profile on our alumni page.

Recording Arts students Kate Haldrup and Aaron Frazer have each been awarded $2,000 creative activity grants from the Hutton Honors College.

Aaron Frazer will be travelling to Mississippi to collect field recordings of African-American and rural music. His research will focus on the importance of traditional religious and secular musical styles to modern-day communities. His recordings will be deposited at the Archives of Traditional Music.

Kate Haldrup will be developing her music and video blog, Second Kitchen Collective. This blog, created by Kate, Stephen Carlsgaard (another Recording Arts student) and several other IU students, chronicles local musicians as well as touring acts that come to the Bloomington community. The grant will fund audio and video production equipment and website design and programming.

Congratulations to Aaron and Kate. These two grants highlight some of the diverse projects Recording Arts students do outside of the classroom.

For the 2011-12 school year IU Music live had over 74,000 visitors from 106 countries and we served more than 4600 hours of on-demand video. Our top events were the Dec 6 Holiday Celebration with 1109 viewers, the four Nutcracker performances with almost 1700 viewers, and he two La Boheme streams with over 1400 viewers.

On April 21 Jazz Studies alumni Randy Brecker, Robert Hurst, Perter Erskine, and Alan Pasqua visited the Jacobs School to give master classes, clinics, and perform with the David Baker Jazz Band and Latin Jazz Band. Recording Arts students and faculty provided the front-of-house PA, audio recording, and a multi-camera live video stream for the event.